I'm a senior editor and the Shanghai bureau chief of Forbes magazine. Now in my 14th year at Forbes, I compile the Forbes China Rich List, Hong Kong Rich List and Taiwan Rich List. I was previously a correspondent for Bloomberg News in Taipei and Shanghai and for the Asian Wall Street Journal in Taipei. I'm a Massachusetts native, fluent Mandarin speaker, and hold degrees from the University of Vermont and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

10/12/2012 @ 11:51AM4,196 views

The success of Chinese search engine Baidu, one of the world’s 10 most popular websites, and its youthful chairman Robin Li is an international business news story covered daily. Li just today ranked No. 2 on the newly unveiled 2012 Forbes China Rich List 400 with wealth of $8.1 billion (click here for the full list).

Much less has been said about Li’s early days back when he just arrived in the U.S. in 1992 to attend graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, better known as University at Buffalo. Li, who then went by his Chinese first name “Yanhong,” had finished an undergraduate degree in library and information science (now called information science) from Peking University before he left China for Buffalo to study computer science. Now 43, Li was interested in search technology several years before Google was set up by his slightly younger contemporaries Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.

Among the individuals that Li crossed paths with at Buffalo to influence his later years: Jonathan J. Hull, a research associate professor who today is manger of the Intelligent Network Research Systems research group at Ricoh Innovations in California. Li once cited Hull on a blog post about people that helped him greatly in America. The two published an academic paper during their years in Buffalo, “Word Recognition Result Interpretation Using the Vector Space Model for Information Retrieval.”

From Buffalo, Li joined the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory as an intern, worked at IDD Information Services (a unit of Dow Jones) for three years, and in 1997 headed to California to work as a software engineer at Infoseek, another search company, before returning to China and co-founding Baidu in 2000.

To learn more about Li’s Buffalo days, I visited the school this summer and talked to Professor Sargur N. Srihari, the director of the school’s Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition. Li worked Srihari for two years in 1992-94 on a research project that was funded by the U.S. Postal Service Office. Excerpts follow:

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Robin was a student at Peking University, the Harvard of China, rather than Tsinghua University, the MIT of China. He was a library science major, and then he came here for his master’s degree. We were then known as a computer science department. We are now known as computer science and engineering. So he came from a nontraditional background. He spent two years on his master’s degree.

I was the supervisor of one of the largest computer laboratories that existed anywhere in the country at that time. I had 150 people who worked at my lab. Robin came at the peak of what we were doing here in Buffalo. At that time, we were largely funded by the United States Postal Service, which does not have its own research division. They picked my group to help them out on their automation needs — reading postal addresses. I was funded directly with $6 million a year. Imagine all the people we could have with $6 million in those days! I had about 15 full-time staff, and 75-80 graduate students

Robin came at this time. And we said, “Wonderful! We can use you.” Normally we didn’t give financial aid to our master’s students, but in those days we had so much money. So Robin was one of my research assistants for two years. We supported him (financially) right from the beginning, in ‘92-93 and ‘93-94. We were aware that he came from a top university.

While he was here, he was funded for doing research. He did an outstanding job. He published a couple of papers in a short period of time. He had that advantage that he was funded for research for two years rather than being distracted. So while he was here, he was financially quite well off. In his first year I think he got about $8,500 dollars, and in second year about a $1,000 dollar raise, to $9,500 dollars, plus the tuition waver. When you’re a research assistant you automatically get a tuition waver. So in a sense, he got his way paid for his two years at Buffalo. He could live really well here in Buffalo.

Robin Li was very close to one of my students, Jonathan Hull. Jonathan Hull was his mentor here. Jon went on to become the head of Ricoh in Silicon Valley. Jon and Robin were very close here.

Robin was quite innovative in the sense that on his own, he wrote papers and he went to conferences to present it on his own in those short two years he was here. There was no Google when he was here as a student in 1992 to 1994. Google came much later. So he wrote one of the early papers on search engines.

The day his company went IPO, I sent him a congratulations note by email. And he responded, ‘It all started in your lab. It was what I was doing.’ He started doing information retrieval here at Buffalo, and we were well ahead of the game in terms of the importance of search engines.

Now fast forward completely: In September (last year), I visited Beijing for an international conference in document analysis and recognition and I was in touch with Yanhong, but I couldn’t meet him. Robin was the main person (behind the conference), but he was not there. So (Baidu) took me around, like a VIP. I got a book as a gift from my visit. It was on Tagore and China. Tagore was an Indian poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 1930s. He was really influenced by China, so it was definitely an appropriate book because of my Indian origins. And this was Baidu. Normally they don’t allow pictures to be taken inside the building, but they said, “Okay, you’re Robin’s professor, so it’s okay.”

He’s also an inspirational figure in China. It’s not that he’s a very wealthy man who doesn’t inspire you. Robin Li does. Young people look up to him.

(Note: Professor Srihari contacted me this month with an update about Robin Li’s success relative to other Buffalo grads: “I keep track of the intellectual achievements of all my former students. A simple way to do this is to go to Google Scholar which lists papers and patents written by individuals and a count of the number of citations that they received. The highest citation count among them is Tin Kam Ho who graduated previously from a top university of Hong Kong, and is now at Lucent Bell Labs, with nearly 1,500 citations. The next is Jonathan Hull who received 450 citations. The third is Bin Zhang, who graduated earlier from Tsinghua University, whose work as a post-doctoral scholar at UCLA received 480 citations. The fourth is Yanhong Li whose singly authored patent on information retrieval, done at a company in the U.S. after graduating from UB, has received 260 citations.”

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Remind me an old Chinese saying “Like Master, like pupil” as in “like father, like son”. Li could go on to do great things in Baidu partly because he was fortunate enough to cross the path with people like Srihara and Hull in Buffalo. I’m sure that this is not the last of it we shall hear stories about Li, Srihara and Hull. In Chinese tradition, the pupil remembers and acknowledges his tutor for life.